Suyama: A Complex Serenity

by Professor Grant Hildebrand

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George Suyama began his architectural practice in Seattle in 1971; his early career is marked by a number of distinguished designs in the contemporaneous wood idiom of the region. Over time, however, Suyama developed an architecture characterized by a search for minimalist simplicity, a paradoxical architecture of intense, even exciting, tranquility. In 2002, he and partners Ric Peterson and Jay Deguchi established Suyama Peterson Deguchi. Their firm has built a distinguished reputation by means of designs influenced by the immediate region and by Suyama's ancestral Japan, which are intimately related to site and executed with an astonishing finesse of detail. Above all, their architecture reflects Suyama's quest to eliminate what he calls "visual noise," a quest that has yielded not visual silence but a kind of visual music. Architectural elements are distilled to a purity analogous to that of a musical tone, and relationships between those elements are as pure and artistically rich as the mathematics of music. In Suyama: A Complex Serenity, Grant Hildebrand introduces the man and his work, discussing relevant aspects of Suyama's life, the influences that have shaped his beliefs, and, in layman's terminology, twenty of his built and unbuilt projects that illuminate the development of his remarkable art and craft. Included also are appendices that illustrate Suyama's deep and long-standing involvement with the arts and product design. Grant Hildebrand is a University of Washington professor emeritus of architecture and art history and author of seven books on architecture, including The Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright's Houses and Frank Lloyd Wright's Palmer House. He is a recipient of the Washington Governor's Writers Award for work of literary merit and lasting value. Read Less

George Suyama began his architectural practice in Seattle in 1971; his early career is marked by a number of distinguished designs in the contemporaneous wood idiom of the region. Over time, however, Suyama developed an architecture characterized by a search for minimalist simplicity, a paradoxical architecture of intense, even exciting, tranquility. In 2002, he and partners Ric Peterson and Jay Deguchi established Suyama Peterson Deguchi. Their firm has built a distinguished reputation by means of designs influenced by the ... Read More